BEVERLY HILLS -- Michael Douglas isn't feeling very gentlemanly towards GQ.

The 61-year-old actor recently generated headlines when the April issue of the magazine quoted him as saying, "I don't know about Brad Pitt, leaving that beautiful wife to go hold orphans for Angelina (Jolie). I mean, how long is that going to last?"

But Douglas, out promoting his new political thriller The Sentinel, tells the Sun he never took those swipes at the superstar couple.

"I didn't say that. I didn't say that at all," says the Oscar-winning star of Fatal Attraction and Basic Instinct.

"I consider (Pitt) a good friend. He did a picture with (Douglas' wife Catherine Zeta-Jones), Ocean's Twelve. Angelina and I both do work with the United Nations and I admire the work she's done.

"I just don't know what this could be about except to sell (the) magazine ... It was a long, lengthy article. I spent more than 20 hours with this reporter with all these tape recorders, and when I asked her to play the tape for me, she told me she turned the tape recorder off (at that point). And I said, 'Well, that was convenient.' ... I don't remember saying anything like it ... I resent it. I'm tape recording every meeting I have now with print media."

But Douglas, who says he wrote letters of apology to Pitt and Jolie, explains he won't take legal action against the magazine because it would only give GQ -- which released the quotes to the press prior to its publication -- more publicity.

"(The writer's) going to stick by her story ... I just found it surprising that somehow the tape recorder was off at this point."

Given this latest bout of publicity, it's no wonder when Douglas, currently sporting a grey-streaked beard, is asked how much he missed work -- and the media glare -- during the three-year hiatus he took prior to The Sentinel, he laughs: "Not much. I would say my priorities have changed dramatically. I think a part of that comes from career ambitions ... I don't ever think of this as a business in which you can balance family and career. So early on, you're working hard on your career -- particularly with my being second generation, you're trying to establish your own identity. I did the best I could as a father for my first son, but, you know, I was away a lot."

Now with his career nearing its 40th anniversary (he appeared in his first film in 1968), Douglas says he's comfortable letting it slide in favour of spending time with his new family -- he and Zeta-Jones have a son, Dylan, 5, and a daughter Carys, who will turn three next week -- and on his work with the UN, promoting disarmament and ridding countries of landmines.

"Most dads, it's always guilt and never seeing your kids enough. So we just had a wonderful, great, bonding experience. And my golf game has improved."

Yet audiences shouldn't expect Douglas -- who will be seen later this year playing Kate Hudson's father in the comedy You, Me and Dupree -- to retire anytime soon. "I like making movies. I love the action. I'll say to Catherine, 'Let's just take a boat and take off for a year and go away.' But I know four months out, I'm going to want a little action, so I maintain a production company."

That company, Further Films, produced The Sentinel, which stars Douglas as Pete Garrison, a veteran Secret Service agent implicated in a plot to kill the president. Kiefer Sutherland and Eva Longoria play the agents assigned to apprehend Garrison, while Kim Basinger portrays the First Lady, with whom Garrison is having an affair. The film opens April 21.

While Douglas and Basinger do share a brief romantic interlude in the film, it's hardly in the same racy league as the erotically charged, sometimes explicit thrillers the actor is identified with.

Basinger, interestingly, was one of the A-list actresses who rejected the role of the icepick-wielding femme fatale made famous by Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct.

Given that the 48-year-old Stone recently bared all for Basic Instinct 2, which Douglas turned down, could another such role be in his future?

"My ass is dragging," he says.

"We did Basic Instinct 14 years ago and we did it really well. It was a great part for Sharon, but I was in the picture and Paul Verhoeven was directing. And sometimes people forget, when there's a really good showy part, what else it needs to be a good movie."

And, he notes, moviegoers seem less interested in erotic dramas than they did a decade ago. "It's increasingly harder on film to do sexual-type movies because of what exists on the Internet and exists on cable television and even exists on Eva's show on a network, Desperate Housewives. The broadcast standards have changed and there's much more titillation involved. It makes a big difference."

As for Basic Instinct 2, which bombed faster than Stone can uncross her legs, Douglas says he hasn't seen it.

"I had a great relationship with Sharon. I'm sorry. I don't quite understand why it had such a bad release ...

"I don't like to do sequels. I like the enjoyment of trying different things and (with the original Instinct) we did a helluva slam dance."

And while Douglas remains fit enough to endure the bullet-dodging action of The Sentinel, he says he's also "not about to kid myself.

"There's nothing worse than an older actor to start pretending he's something he's not as far as age or this and that -- and my knee hurts."